Boring's Fall Calendar: Marathon, Farms, Bigfoot and Halloween

If you live anywhere near the Springwater Trail today, you already know something is different. Cars are parked along streets that are normally empty by 7 a.m. There's a runner in a neon vest jogging past your driveway before your coffee finishes brewing. This is the 13th annual Boring Marathon, Half-Boring Half Marathon, Constantly Boring 10K, and Somewhat Boring 5K, and if you've lived in town for more than one September, you've probably wondered exactly what it does to your morning. The answer is more specific, and less disruptive, than most people assume.

The Marathon That Doesn't Close a Single Road

Here's the part that surprises people who haven't run it or watched it: the race organizers are explicit that they will not be closing any roads for the event. Instead, runners cross at marked intersections, watched over by volunteers, orange cones, and the occasional pushed crosswalk button. Drivers still have the right of way. The organizers put it plainly on their own site, warning entrants that in any dispute between a car and a runner, the runner comes out worse.

"In a contest of runner versus car, the runner loses."

That single line tells you most of what you need to know about how this race actually behaves on your street. It isn't a shutdown. It's a series of supervised crossings along a route that spends most of its mileage on the paved, car-free Springwater Trail, a rails-to-trails conversion that follows an old rail line from Boring toward Portland.

The four races share one start and finish line at Boring Station Trailhead Park, just off SE Dee St, and stagger their starts through the morning:

What actually shows up in your neighborhood is parking, not pavement closures. Registration caps the field at 100 marathoners, 220 half-marathoners, and 140 each for the 10K and 5K, which puts several hundred cars looking for a spot before 7 a.m. Organizers direct that overflow to Boring Middle School, Naas Elementary School, and the Boring-Damascus Grange, and this year they added nearly 100 additional spaces to that map. If you live near the start line, the practical note is this: access to parking runs through SE Wally Rd and SE School Ave after 6:15 a.m., since runners will be crossing SE Dee St throughout the morning.

Who's Actually Behind It

The race is entirely volunteer-run, and every dollar it brings in beyond basic costs, permits, medals, food, timing, goes to the Sam Barlow High School Track & Field and Cross Country teams and the West Orient & Damascus Middle School track programs. That's not incidental branding. It's the reason the event exists at all, and it explains why a town of a few thousand people can field a marathon that qualifies finishers for Boston.

The self-deprecating name has become part of the town's identity rather than something to apologize for. Boring's official sister city is Dull, Scotland, and any registered resident of Dull who shows up to run gets free entry, though they're on the hook for their own airfare. Packet pickup happens in two places that reflect the town's actual geography: Friday evening at Boring Brewing Co.'s tasting room in nearby Sandy, then Saturday afternoon and race morning at Boring Station Trailhead Park itself. It's worth keeping those two straight, since Boring Brewing Co. in Sandy and Boring Winery & Taproom back in town are different businesses with similar names and very different personalities.

Where the Calendar Goes After the Finish Line

Race weekend functions as the hinge between summer and the harvest stretch that follows. Once the medals are handed out, the next few weekends belong to the farms.

Liepold Family Farms, a roughly 250-acre operation on SE Richey Road that's been growing berries in Boring since 1952, shifts its whole identity in the fall. Spring and summer mean strawberries, raspberries, blueberries, and blackberries sold at the farm stand and at area farmers markets. Once September turns, the same fields become a corn maze that gets a new design every year, past themes have ranged from monster-movie motifs to an under-the-sea world, alongside a pumpkin patch, hayrides, and an apple slingshot that lets visitors launch fruit at a target for a prize. A short drive away, Bushue Farm carries its own version of the same seasonal handoff, trading its spring strawberry-picking tradition for a fall pumpkin patch and the kind of apple cider donuts that turn into a standing weekend errand for a lot of Boring families.

Neither farm is new, and neither is trying to be. That's part of what makes them work. They're multi-generational operations that happen to sit inside a town whose name suggests nothing is happening, which is exactly backward.

The One Stop That Doesn't Care What Season It Is

While the farms rotate with the calendar, one Boring landmark welcomes visitors year-round. The North American Bigfoot Center sits at the junction of Highway 26 and Highway 212. More than 30,000 vehicles pass that stretch of Highway 26 every day, and Mount Hood Territory logs more reported Bigfoot sightings than any other part of the state.

Cliff Barackman, the longtime evidence analyst on Animal Planet's Finding Bigfoot, opened the center with his wife Melissa in August 2019 after roughly three decades of personal research into the subject. Inside, visitors find footprint casts, eyewitness accounts, and a life-size animatronic Bigfoot the staff have nicknamed Murphy. The center is open every day from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. except Christmas, which makes it one of the few stops on this list that doesn't require checking a seasonal calendar first. On a wet October afternoon when the farms are muddy and the trail is soaked through, it's a reliable fallback.

The Last Stop Before Halloween

The season closes out with Geren's Annual Trunk or Treat, held this year on Sunday, October 25 at a home on SE Kelso Rd, the same general stretch of road that runs past the Liepold Farms entrance. It's a small, neighborhood-scale event, but it lands at exactly the point in the calendar when the corn maze crowds thin out and people start looking for the last organized reason to get the kids in costume before the actual holiday.

The Pattern Underneath It

Look at the map of everything above and a shape emerges. The Springwater Trail carries the marathon. SE Richey Road and SE Kelso Road carry the farms. The Highway 26 and 212 junction carries the one attraction with year-round hours. SE Haley Road carries the winery scene, voted Best Wine Tasting in a 2025 Reader's Choice poll run by The Outlook and Sandy Post, where the taproom pours its own wine and beer alongside a food menu built around pizza, fondue, and charcuterie, and where the calendar fills with live music and paint nights straight through the colder months.

That's the actual mechanism behind Boring's fall social life. It isn't a long list of unrelated things to do. It's a small number of family-run operations and a handful of roads, doing the same things they've done for years, timed so that one hands off to the next just as the previous one winds down. The marathon opens the season on a trail with no closures. The farms carry it through October. The Bigfoot Center holds the fort on the days when nothing else is scheduled. And a Trunk or Treat on Kelso Road closes it out before Halloween proper arrives.

None of it requires you to drive to Gresham or Portland to find something worth doing on a Saturday. It just requires knowing which weekend belongs to which road.

If you're weighing what it actually feels like to live in a town like this year-round, not just visit it for a corn maze or a race weekend, Yolanda Guzman can walk you through what's currently available in Boring and the surrounding area. Let's Connect.